The Dawns Are Quiet Here - Women are the invisible combatants of World War II. (Blog Post)
The Dawns are Quiet here is a famous 1972 Russian film about a detachment of Red Army AA girls stationed in Karelia in 1941 during WWII.
The following is my favourite segment from the film. The young girl, Rita, remembers meeting her husband before the war, while stationed on the frontline, later she sneaks out to secertly see her child while stationed... A german plane files overheard, the girls man their zenitka's to fire on the enemy planes, eventually shooting one down... a lone parachustist is left, Rita aims for him...
I reccomend reading Women in Combat: The World War II Experience in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union D'Ann Campbell -
Love Sex and War - John Costello: Soviet Women Snipe from Behind. Pilots: Shot Down by a Woman
The
Soviet women's contribution to their country's all-out battle for
survival was heavily embellished by Stalin's propaganda machine, with
the intention of both rallying the Russian people and persuading his
British and American allies to open a second front in Europe. A
celebrated girl-sniper, who had reportedly shot no fewer than 309
German soldiers while fighting with the Red Army on the Dnieper Front,
was sent on a well-publicized tour of the United States.
Throughout
the summer of 1943, American newspapers and magazines featured the
heroic exploits of other Soviet military heroines, giving the
impression that women and men were fighting alongside one another all
along the eastern front. The reality was less spectacular, if no less
heroic, for those individual women were not officially in front-line
Red Army units but were guerillas operating behind the German lines.
Nor, as the testimony of some of the veteran female pilots reveals, had
the Soviet military come to terms with the female warriors in its
midst.
'We
were to have equality in every possible sense, though in reality we had
to struggle for that in some cases when we got to the front,' recalled
one of the woman pilots. None of them faced a greater initial
resistance than a stunning blonde with grey eyes and wooing smile
called Lily Litvak. The commanding officer of the unit to which she was
initially posted near Stalingrad in August 1943 refused to let her fly
with his men and ordered her to seek an immediate transfer. But
Lieutenant Litvak used her considerable charm to plead for just one
chance to prove her combat skill. The sceptical Red Air Force commander
could not resist, and Lily was given a plane to show what she could do.
After a dogfight in which she skilfully out-manoeuvred a German to
share the 'kill' of a Messerschmitt 109, Lieutenant Litvak removed all
doubts about a woman's ability to fight in combat. She was welcomed to
a permanent place in the squadron.
Her
male comrades, however, were probably behind one practical joke which
terrified Lily's female wing-mate. While on patrol, ten thousand feet
above the river Don, she discovered a mouse. 'I know it sounds crazy –
a fighter pilot frightened by a mouse but I'd always had this fear of
mice,' Olga Yemshokova recalled years later. 'And particularly now it
was sitting on my lap looking up at me, in that tiny cockpit.' She
admitted she 'could feel her flesh creeping' as she opened the cockpit
and flung the little furry creature out into the slipstream.
During
the next ten months, Lily Litvak led a charmed life as she out-flew and
out-fought German pilots over the eastern front to become a Soviet
fighter 'ace' as well as the focus of romantic rivalry between many of
the men who flew with her. But Lily left no-one in any doubt that she
had fallen in love with the handsome Lieutenant Alexi Salomaten, with
whom she had flown 'tail' in her first combat mission. Such personal
relationships were strictly discouraged in the mixed Red Air Force
regiments. Women were deliberately quartered in a distant part of the
airfield, even if this meant they had to live in converted cowsheds.
But no regulations could prevent many of the female aircrew from
forming emotional attachments with the men with whom they shared the
dangers of battle.
'Lily
told me that it was agony up there sometimes when Alexi was being
attacked. But of course it gave each of them an incentive to fight
really well,' remembered her mechanic, Ina Pasportnikova. 'Far from
their love for each other affecting their concentration, I think it
helped. Lily had always shown the sort of aggression you need to be a
good fighter pilot. But her love for Alexi was the thing that turned
her into a killer.'
Lily
Litvak survived a burst of German cannon fire in which she sustained
serious leg wounds. The encounter left her with a limp and sharpened
her killer instinct, which hardened into a driving obsession after
Alexi Salomaten died in a crash. Shortly afterwards she claimed her
tenth victim, a famous German 'ace'. He had the misfortune to survive
to be confronted with the pilot who had ended his career. The Luftwaffe
hero refused to believe he had been out-fought by a woman until Lily
icily explained the manoeuvres in the action that had brought him down.
'The German's whole attitude, even his physical appearance, changed,'
reported an eyewitness to the confrontation. 'He was forced to concede
in the end that no-one except the pilot who had beaten him could
possibly have known, move by move, exactly how the fight had gone.
There was no question of saluting the victor. He could not meet her
eye. To have been shot down by a woman was more than he could bear.'
(pp. 50-52)
Soviet women bore their share of the burden in the Great Patriotic War. While most toiled in industry, transport, agriculture
and other civilian roles, working double shifts to free up enlisted men
to fight and increase military production, a sizable number of women
took up arms.
800,000 women served in the Soviet Armed Forces during the war.Nearly 200,000 were decorated and 89 eventually received the Soviet Union’s highest award, the Hero of the Soviet Union. They served as pilots, snipers, machine gunners, tank crew members and partisans, as well as in auxiliary roles.
At first, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941,
thousands of women who volunteered were turned away. Two factors
changed attitudes and ensured a greater role for women who wanted to
fight: the losses to the Germans after their initial success in 1941
and the efforts of determined women. In the early stages of the war,
the fastest route to advancement in the military for women was service
in medical and auxiliary units.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_the_Great_Patriotic_War
"Gun women" was the contemptuous
German term for Soviet women who carried or fired weapons. Many Soviet
women were without uniforms and thus considered de facto
partisans. The Germans looked upon armed Soviet women as
"unnatural" and consequently had no compunction about shooting such
"vermin" as soon as they were captured. The verbal degradation of
enemy females made it easier for German soldiers to overcome
inhibitions about harming women.
